Donald Trump

MS NOW - President Donald Trump will not be on the ballot in November’s midterm elections. But in a recent White House strategy meeting, he reportedly decided that as Election Day approaches, he’d like to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting himself. The tone-deaf strategy serves as yet another example of how Trump’s self-adulation is frequently the source of his biggest strategic mistakes.

According to The Atlantic, citing “three people familiar with the meeting,” Trump gathered his political advisers to figure out how he should spend the $400 million in funds available to his super political action committee, MAGA Inc. He reportedly settled on trying to “lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself” and ordered “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” Trump apparently wants ad makers to “mine his own on-camera statements” for these ads, and focus on his tax breaks, the stock market’s rise and his failed war on fentanyl, among other things.

This reported ad spend decision underscores Trump’s conviction that he alone can carry Republicans to victory at the polls this fall. Last week at a rally for Sen. Darline Graham Nordone, R-S.C., Trump pleaded to the audience, “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”